Investigated Reporting

Muckrakers, Regulators, and the Struggle over Television Documentary

Chad Raphael

Publication Year: 2005

Investigated Reporting is Chad Raphael's ambitious exploration of the relationship between journalism and regulation during American television's first sustained period of muckraking, between 1960 and 1975. Offering new and important insights into the economic, political, and industrial forces that shaped documentaries such as Harvest of Shame, Hunger in America, and Banks and the Poor, Raphael puts investigative television documentary into its institutional, regulatory, and cultural context. _x000B_Those who see investigative reporting as a watchdog on government will be surprised to find that these controversial reports relied heavily on official sources for inspiration, information, and regulatory protection from muckraking's critics. Based on superb historical research using primary sources, including recently opened papers from the Nixon White House, Raphael exposes the complex play of influence through which investigative documentaries were both shaped and attacked by government officials, and highlights the troubling legacy for contemporary regulation of television news. _x000B__x000B__x000B__x000B_

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

I am beholden to Chuck Kleinhans, Manjunath Pendakur, Robert
Entman, Michael Curtin, and especially Rick Maxwell, for their comments
on drafts of this work and encouragement of my research. I am also indebted
for their valuable advice to Nick Lawrence, Benjamin I. Page, and David
Hesmondhalgh. ...

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Classical liberal theorists of the media’s role in democracy, from
John Locke to Thomas Paine, saw journalism’s primary mission as serving as
a watchdog on government, by checking abuses of power, exposing corruption,
and giving citizens the information they need to manage public affairs. ...

Part I. Politics

1. Investigating Poverty and Welfare

Some of the most controversial documentaries of the 1960s peered
behind the image of America’s postwar affluence to gaze at the lives of the
poor. Three reports on poverty were most extensively investigated by government
forces: Harvest of Shame (CBS, 1960), The Battle of Newburgh (NBC,
1962), and Hunger in America (CBS, 1968). ...

2. Investigating the Cold War

As noted in the introduction, the dramatic growth of network
documentary in the early 1960s was identified with gaining public consent for
the Kennedy administration’s activist foreign policy. The New Frontiersmen
and network journalists made the global competition between communism and
capitalism a central documentary topic. ...

3. Investigating Business and Consumerism

Broadcast news critics often attacked reports that turned a critical
lens on business’s treatment of consumers in the 1960s and early 1970s. The era
was marked by a rising consumer politics and a special relationship between
the news media and consumer advocates in government, social movements,
and the professions. ...

Part II. Representation

4. Dividing and Distracting the Media

The impact of investigative reporting on policy and public opinion
depends in part on how the rest of the news media react to muckraking
stories and any countercharges they provoke. The news media provide the
main public forum for subsequent discussion of issues raised by investigative
reporters. ...

5. The Ethics of Representation

By the time The Selling of the Pentagon came under fire in 1971,
attacks on investigative documentaries had assumed regular enough patterns
that former CBS News president Fred Friendly compiled a mock five-step
“demolition manual” for use by the aggrieved. It involved enlisting sympathetic
federal politicians to decry a report, ...

Part III. Regulation

6. The Politics of Regulation

In the 1960s and 1970s, the investigative documentary became a
crucial battleground in struggles over regulating television news content as
old and new actors in the policy process challenged the networks.1 Yet the
FCC consistently protected broadcasting against its critics, as did some within
Congress and the judiciary. ...

7. The Privatization of Regulation

Despite the many investigations of investigative reporting, the
regulatory regime of the 1960s and early 1970s provided rich soil for the growth
of television muckraking. Regulators’ demands for public-service programming
helped prompt the networks and local stations to plow resources into
substantive reporting, including in-depth documentaries. ...

8. Media, State, and Investigative Reporting

In the early 1960s, the rising television documentary was buoyed
by widespread elite support from political leaders, regulators, cultural critics,
network executives, and journalists. By the mid-1970s, that consensus
had fractured. What do the growing elite conflicts over the documentary at
this time tell us about theories of media-state relations, ...

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